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VizThink Europe 2008 Recap: General Session 3

The Tuesday morning general session was facilitated by Ole Qvist-Sorensen & Amber Nystrom and focused on the opportunities for using visual thinking to help contribute to solving the challenges of Climate Change. Both Ole and Amber have dedicated a lot of their personal time towards climate change education and action

They explained that there are nine months to the Copenhagen Agreement where almost 10,000 decision makers will gather and set a direction for the years to come. Ole & Amber challenged the group to imagine if there was a shared language which could assist these leaders in their dialogues and how might the visual thinking industry help define or support that language?

To start with the attendees were asked to self identify themselves with one of several groups (i.e. designer, consultant, facilitator, etc.) depending on their skills or profession. Each group collected as tables of 6-8 and were posed with the question, to be answered individually, “What is the most important thing I have to offer to help solve this problem?”. Using one sheet of paper, using words or images, each person put down what they had to offer.

Following a quick report out – where each person at the table shared their idea, the groups were asked to take a large sheet of paper and come up with what their collective skill or profession had to offer.  After a few minutes of discussion and drawing the groups were invited to bring their results up to the stage to share with the rest of the conference.

All in all it was an interesting session and some of the questions posed were certainly challenging to answer. When Ole posed the “big question” (What do you have to offer?) you could see a lot of scrunched brows and deep thought taking place throughout the room.

Ole & Amber will be taking the results from this session with them to Copenhagen next year and are actively working to get additional visual thinkers to participate both formally and informally.

Upcoming Webinar

Ole will be joining us for a webinar on Wednesday, December 10, 2008 at 11:00am EST (16:00 GMT) to continue the discussion started at VizThink Europe. As I mentioned above the opportunity for the visual thinking community is huge, and our contribution is desperately needed. During this webinar, we will discuss questions such as:

• What is the role of the visual thinking community?
• Imagine if the visual community were the catalyst. What could be our greatest contribution to this moment in time?
• We need a new language – what does it look like?
• We need new skills – what are they and how are they trained?
• We need new solutions – what do they look like and how are they created?
• How might we step up and offer our approaches, skills and tools to assist leading thinkers, politicians, business people and scientist in sensing deeper, communicating clearer and acting faster?

For more information visit the webinar page on the VizThink site or go here to register.

Photos from the general session follow in a slideshow below:

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